The xcompmgr utility is a sample compositing manager. You can enable client-side shadows with -c or server-side shadows with -s. There is also the transset utility to set the transparency of windows as a whole.

Installation

One way of installing is to to just get a copy of xorg/xserver git repository and build it with configure, make and make install. You need to use --enable-kdrive option to build kdrive. However, there are build dependencies on other components. You can install their development packages if your distribution is pretty recent. If that doesn't work, you can get the dependent packages one by one from git. Or build the full modular X.org, that will provide the necessary dependent libraries.